For those experimenting with question and answer databases, answers.firstgov.gov might be an interesting example. It allows you to filter Q&As by topic, and also has a "People who viewed this answer also viewed:" feature.

Friday, December 16, 2005

The new Thomas look was heralded back in July, and was supposed to look like this , but now that they're finally up and running they look like this. Amazing to note how much web-aesthetics change in just 6 months!

There are (at least) two shortcuts to posting to blogger.com blogs that bypass the cumbersome "go to blogger.com, remember your password and enter it, login, select create new post" procedure. One is to download the Google toolbar with the "Blog this" button. When you see a webpage you would like to post to the blog, just click on the button and it will bring up your blogger.com editing screen.

A newer and more interesting variation, for Firefox users only, is the "Blogger Web Comments for Firefox" utility. This pop-up allows you to see what other people have said about a web page, and also allows you to send a post to the blog (to ircworld or any other blogger.com blog you're a member of) without leaving the page. It's an extremely handy tool...read all about it athttp://www.google.com/tools/firefox/webcomments/index.html

The monthly "Worthwhile Web" column on the OSIS net is always a reliable source of interesting web discoveries; this month I was delighted to find out about www.linkhounds.com . There are two tools here of particular interest; Link Harvester is a sophisticated tool for analyzing links to a particular domain or web page. Hub-finder identifies sites that have co-occurring link to sites on a particular topic. This can be very useful, and draws on the same logic that citation indexes used to identify relevant resources in the pre-online days. Let us say say you are looking for good sites on defense/security information. You submit up to 10 of your favorite security info sites to Hub Finder, and it will find additional sites that are linked to from at least two of the sites you entered. For example, I entered www.fas.org, www.cdi.org, and www.globalsecurity.org. Hub-finder then found 22 other sites with at least two matching backlinks, including several interesting sites that I'd not been aware of.

Ordinary people are sometimes better public diplomats than government officials, and storytelling is an effective medium for creating people to people empathy and mutual understanding. Marylaine Block's December 9 "Ex Libris" article ( "Tell me a story") reviews several excellent storytelling sites on the web. Storytelling, and StoryCorps's Oral History Project, is also the cover story in this month's issue of American Libraries.

Thursday, December 8, 2005

The Talis white paper Do libraries matter? The rise of Library 2.0 offers some interesting perspectives on the future of libraries. The authors propose a strategy for libraries to adjust to the emergence of Web 2.0, which incorporates some of those trends that have been discussed her lately, e.g. social bookmarking, the web as a platform for running applications, increasing democratization of the web, syndication (ie. pushing content rather than pulling audience), etc.

The November 22 edition of PC Magazine takes a look at what it describes as "community search engines", including del.icio.us (which by the way gets a poor score). For IRCworlders who are wondering what social bookmarking is all about, and enjoy the PC Mag style of comparing products, this article, "Never Search Alone" by Rick Broida, may be worth a quick glance. An indication that this type of online collaboration may be entering the mainstream?

Sunday, December 4, 2005

Del.icio.us and the social boomarking phenomenon is an interesting development worth looking into. An excellent introduction, that includes an overview of several social bookmarking tools (including CiteULike), is the article "Social Bookmarking Tools: a General Review" from the April 2005 issue of Dlib magazine. Jon Udell, creator of the wonderful "Walking Tour of Keene" screencast (see enthusiastic posting at ircworld in March, 2005) has also created a nifty screencast that provides a whirlwind 5 minute tour of del.icio.us from a user's perspective.